UPDATE: The score for Sherlock Holmes has been changed from 53 to 57 to reflect the most recent reviews. [1/2]

Lock, stock, and two terrible movies

The director of the new Sherlock Holmes adaptation opening on Christmas day, Guy Ritchie is a man more famous than his box office numbers would seem to indicate. The English filmmaker's five previous films have a combined gross of just $40 million in the United States (and $117 million worldwide), and he hasn't had a box office hit since 2001. Of course, while you may not have seen his movies, you likely have heard about his personal life -- it comes with the territory when you marry (and then divorce) Madonna.

So how good have those little-seen movies been, and what can we expect from Sherlock Holmes, his first big-budget movie geared toward a mainstream audience? The good news is that, as the chart of Metascores by film (below) indicates, Ritchie is on the rebound after a few critically-panned misfires. The bad news? He still has just one movie to his name where the good reviews strongly outweigh the bad, and that was 10 years ago.

Metascores of Movies Directed by Guy Ritchie

Movies are plotted by Metascore, a weighted average of scores from top professional critics, on a scale from 0 (bad) to 100 (good).

Let's examine each of these movies in more detail. The pie charts indicate the percentage of critics giving positive (green), mixed (yellow) and negative (red) reviews.

Movies Directed by Guy Ritchie, 1999 - Present

	Title	Netflix	Year	Metascore	Users
	Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels		1999	66	9.2
	Est. Production Budget: ???		Worldwide Gross: $25.3M
	"Dark, dangerous and a great deal of wicked, amoral fun." --Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times				critics:23,4,3

In retrospect, Ritchie's debut sent the wrong impression. An audacious, stylish, and hyperactive heist comedy, it branded the director as an English version of Quentin Tarantino. Many critics enjoyed Lock, Stock's colorful characters and playful approach to violence, and the film received mostly positive notices. But a few reviewers foreshadowed things to come, such as Manohla Dargis (then writing in the LA Weekly), who found the story "tediously convoluted."

Although the film grossed under $4 million in the States, it was a hit in the UK, and marked Ritchie as a major new talent. That buzz landed the director a major studio deal for his next film.

	Title	Netflix	Year	Metascore	Users
	Snatch		2001	55	8.6
	Est. Production Budget: ???		Worldwide Gross: $83.5M
	"Mr. Ritchie seems to be stepping backward when he should be moving ahead." --AO Scott, The New York Times				critics:17,9,5

Snatch remains Ritchie's biggest commercial success, by a large margin. (Adding a Brad Pitt to your cast certainly helps in that regard.) But if Sony was hoping for another Lock, Stock, well, that's almost exactly what they got. Ritchie's second film is, like his first, a kinetic caper comedy, exhibiting the same visual flare and filmmaking bravado (and even many of the same actors) but, according to critics, executing it less successfully.

Many reviewers simply found Snatch to be an inferior copy of its predecessor. Roger Ebert was typical of such critics, writing that Snatch "follows the ... formula so slavishly it could be like a new arrangement of the same song," while the Boston Globe's Jay Carr asked "whether Ritchie has the range to do anything else." Complaints also began to surface that Ritchie's films were all surface and no substance, with critics like Salon's Stephanie Zacharek pegging Snatch as "elaborately empty."

But aside from these complaints, things were looking up for Ritchie. Snatch was a box office success, and he was married to Madonna. And for his next movie, he would break from his well-defined formula for the first time. Big mistake.

	Title	Netflix	Year	Metascore	Users
	Swept Away		2002	18	5.7
	Est. Production Budget: $10M		Worldwide Gross: $0.6M
	"Not as bad as rumor would have it. It's worse." --Megan Lehmann, New York Post				critics: 2,4,21

Although it didn't quite finish in Metacritic's list of 50 Worst Films of the Decade, Swept Away came awfully close (with an emphasis on the word "awful"). Ritchie decided to cast his wife in this romantic comedy remake of Lina Wertmuller's 1974 classic of the same name, and it earned both husband and wife an unprecedented number of statuettes... at the 2002 Golden Raspberry Awards.

The film was a complete disaster at the box office (taking in just $600,000 in the U.S. despite a $10 million budget), and it fared equally poorly with the critics. Madonna's performance was universally panned, with Newsweek's Jeff Giles calling it "starkly amateurish" and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone adding, "Madonna continues to mistake a knack for striking poses with the interpretive skill of a real actor." The words for Ritchie were equally harsh, with Zacharek writing (again in Salon), "You can't believe any human beings would ever utter such ludicrous dialogue, with so little conviction."

After such a misfire, returning to a successful formula seemed like a good idea for the director. It wasn't.

	Title	Netflix	Year	Metascore	Users
	Revolver		2007	25	5.1
	Est. Production Budget:???		Worldwide Gross: $6.8M
	"The problem with Revolver is that it is Ritchie's first attempt at a 'serious' look at the underworld, but the result is so pretentious and muddled it's almost a little embarrassing." --Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald				critics:1,5,15

Revolver found Ritchie once again telling a story about professional criminals, but this time substituting philosophy and spirituality for black comedy. The film bombed upon its release in the UK in 2005, and didn't land in the States until two years later (in a slightly re-tooled version), where it bombed again, grossing a pitiful $85,000 in its American run.

Critics found Ritchie's newfound seriousness to be "pretentious" "psychobabble," with the film's fractured storytelling resulting in a "mess" that's hard to get involved in -- or stay awake during. Although, to be fair, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Stephen Rea points out that fans of "jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings" might take some interest in the film.

After a string of failures, critics and moviegoers seemed to be telling Ritchie one thing: go back to crime comedies. And that's exactly what he did.

	Title	Netflix	Year	Metascore	Users
	RocknRolla		2008	53	7.4
	Est. Production Budget: ???		Worldwide Gross: $25.7M
	"As punchy and energetic as the first few moments are, the rest of the film quickly falls back into mediocrity." --James Berardinelli, ReelViews				critics:15,9,4

Returning to the highly stylized crime comedy formula that seemed to work for Lock, Stock and Snatch, RocknRolla brought Ritchie his greatest box office success in seven years, taking in a decent $25.7 million internationally and doing especially well in the UK. A number of critics even liked the new film, embracing Ritchie's convoluted and cartoonish storytelling style as "cleverly constructed" and "a lot of fun."

But, as with Ritchie's earlier movies, some critics complained about a lack of substance. Manohla Dargis, now with The New York Times, was representative of such reviewers, writing, "Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose." And the words "self-conscious" turn up in multiple reviews.

We're still not quite sure why the name Guy Ritchie came up as a potential director for a big-budget adaptation of Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, but evidently, someone saw something in Ritchie's track record to indicate that he was the right man for the job. The reason, of course, is that the new film is intended to be a break from traditional presentations of the Holmes stories, and instead present a tale more in line with contemporary sensibilities and filled with action sequences -- qualities that abound in Ritchie's films. Sherlock Holmes is the first feature directed by Ritchie that was not also written by him, which some could take to be an encouraging sign. And yet ...

	Title	Netflix	Year	Metascore	Users
	Sherlock Holmes		2009	57	6.7
	Est. Production Budget: $80M*
	"Ritchie has never worked on a scale anything approaching this before and, while some of the directorial affectations are distracting, he keeps the action humming." --Todd McCarthy, Variety				critics:17,13,4

Ritchie had a large budget at his disposal for the first time, but the movie requires him to adapt his sensibilities to appeal to a mainstream audience. Considering that Ritchie has had a difficult time appealing to even his small group of fans in recent years, this could be a problem. An even bigger warning sign is that the few times in the past where Ritchie has stepped away from his hyperactive gangster comedy formula, the result was disastrous.

But if early reviews are any indication, Sherlock Holmes may not be a great movie, but it is also not a Swept Away-level catastrophe. The critics so far seem to be enjoying the energy of Ritchie's film, if not -- as seems to be the case with each of his movies -- the substance. How will the public respond? We'll know in a few days.

The Metascore is a weighted average of scores from top professional critics, on a scale from 0 (bad) to 100 (good). User scores represent an average of scores assigned by Metacritic.com site visitors on a scale from 0 (bad) to 10 (good). Source of box office grosses and budgets: Box Office Mojo. * Source of Sherlock Holmes budget: Empire.